Register now for our Open Access Week webcasts!

Register now for one or both of our upcoming Open Access Week webcasts. Both will feature leading figures from the Open Access movement talking directly to students about the impact of Open Access to research and their crucial role in making Open Access a reality – thereby opening the full scholarly record to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Each webcast is open for anyone to attend, and both will feature a live Q&A session incorporating comments from a live Twitter steam using the hashtag #r2rcwebcast. Registration is required but free, and you can register by clicking on the links below.

The State of Open Access and the Student Role in Creating Change

Our Monday webcast will feature Heather Joseph, Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), speaking on the current state of Open Access and the importance of students in making open the new norm in scholarly publishing. The webcast will also feature Goldis Chami, a medical student at the University of British Columbia, who will detail her experience leading the charge for a campus open-access policy at her university and give tips on how students can be most effective in advocating for Open Access on campus.

About our speakers:

Heather Joseph serves as the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international coalition of over 800 libraries working to enable a more open system of scholarly communication. As SPARC’s Director, she has focused on supporting the development of new publishing strategies and business models, and advocating for national and international policies that encourage the adoption of Open Access as a central principle of research and scholarship. Prior to joining SPARC, she spent 15 years as a publishing executive in both commercial and not-for-profit publishing organizations. She is an active participant on the Board of Directors of numerous not-for-profit organizations, and is a frequent speaker and writer on scholarly communications in general, and on Open Access in particular.

Goldis Chami is a medical student at the University of British Columbia and a member of the Right to Research Coalition Steering Committee. She has led the charge for her institution to adopt an open-access policy and serves on its Scholarly Communications Steering Committee. She is also actively working to get more Canadian students involved in promoting Open Access and to support local advocacy efforts through her work on a forthcoming on-campus advocacy guide. She writes regularly for the Globe and Mail blog about medical training and healthcare.

Open Access and the Impact of Open on Research

Our Wednesday webcast will feature John Wilbanks, a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and the former Vice President for Science at Creative Commons, who will discuss Open Access and how open has the power to transform research. This webcast will also feature Goldis Chami who will describe the student role as a catalyst for creating change on campus, using her personal experience at the University of British Columbia.

About our speakers:

John Wilbanks works on Open Access, open data, and open innovation systems. He is a Senior Fellow with the Kauffman Foundation and leads the Portable Legal Consent Project at Sage Bionetworks. He has worked at Harvard Law School, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the World Wide Web Consortium, the US House of Representatives, and Creative Commons. John sits on the Board of Directors for Sage Bionetworks, AcaWiki, and 1DegreeBio, as well as the Advisory Board for Boundless Learning. He holds a bachelors degree in philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Goldis Chami is a medical student at the University of British Columbia and a member of the Right to Research Coalition Steering Committee. She has led the charge for her institution to adopt an open-access policy and serves on its Scholarly Communications Steering Committee. She is also actively working to get more Canadian students involved in promoting Open Access and to support local advocacy efforts through her work on a forthcoming on-campus advocacy guide. She writes regularly for the Globe and Mail about medical training and healthcare.

Comments

I feature your RSS feed on my blog. Students can be most helpful in clarifying the points that Stefan Harnad makes: Open Access is not incompatible with commercial publishing, as long as publishers support green open access principles. Stevan says, "The simplest, easiest, surest, fastest and most direct way of making journal articles OA is for their authors to make them freely accessible online by self-archiving them on the web, free for all, immediately upon acceptance for publication by whatever journal they publish them in ("Green OA")." http://tinyurl.com/6xhyxn8